"Three Quarters" or 750GB Hard Disk Drives Roundup. Page 20

This roundup includes solutions from all companies making 750GB hard disk drives these days: Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital. We will discuss features and performance of 10 hard drives with 750GB storage capacity.

Defragmentation

Next goes our homemade test of defragmentation speed. We created a very defragmented file system on a 32GB partition of a hard disk by loading it with music, video, games and applications. Then we saved a per-sector copy of the disk and now copy it to the HDD we want to test. The tested HDD is connected to the mainboard’s SATA controller whose operation mode (AHCI/Standard SATA) is controlled from the mainboard’s BIOS. Next we run a FC-Test script that evokes the console version of the Perfect Disk 8.0 defragmenter and marks the time of the beginning and end of the defragmentation process.

Thus, each HDD is tested twice: with the controller’s AHCI support enabled and disabled. You can refer to a dedicated article for details about this test.

The results follow below. Unfortunately, we couldn’t test both enterprise HDDs from Seagate in it:

This test may be questionable because its load is very specific. The Samsung wins it, especially with disabled AHCI. The WD RE2 and Hitachi performed well, too. On the losing side are both drives from Seagate (the newer 7200.11 took more time to defragment than the 7200.10) and the Western Digital Caviar Blue.